Planet Earth Series

The solid clay balls in the “Planet Earth” series are created (accidentally) at the TONDACH brick factory near Prague, CZ.

As the clay is sent from one building to another it travels on conveyor belts towards a machine which mixes the clay and then sends it on to an extruder. During this process some of the clay falls back down the belt then travels back up gathering more clay as it goes, this process repeats until the “balls” are too big to travel upward….at which point they are discarded.

I began gathering these “balls”, taking them to the driers and them hauling them to either my studio there to put engobes on them and then to the kilns, for firing. Why? because I thought they were beautiful.

I use them as metaphors for our planet earth and add pieces to them. These pieces are mostly discarded or broken objects whose usefulness has expired…these may reflect something else…maybe churches, buildings, suns, our industrial existence, people, activities….anything goes, sometimes the piece is funny, sometimes not.

On a different level, these pieces made up of discarded objects which were themselves created for some specific purpose is, for me, a record of our civilization and just as a fossil record is beautiful and mysterious, so is whatever I “find”.

In the end these pieces have to do with transformation, in more ways than one.